The Pope's speech to the German Parliament

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http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_listening_heart
As ever, the man is worth listening to. But the responses in the comments thread just show how bloody useless it is to deliver intellectually distinguished and morally valuable speeches in a world where most people know no history but are stuffed full of out-of-context factoids and believe themselves entitled to judge.

Comments

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I am no scholar of Hebraism, but my problem with what you say is that all our Jewish evidence is the result of centuries of selection. Until the discovery of the DSSs, we had little or nothing that was not either the result of centuries of selection and preservation, or, even worse, of Christian preservation (Philo and the books of Enoch were, I believe, preserved only by Christians). The Essene literature, if it is indeed Essene and not from one of the seven or more sects many of wich we know only by name, have allowed us to understand the Bar Kochba outburst, which was simply not explicable from the perspective you describe - I cannot underline strongly enough, first, that it was an all-out assault on the whole Roman society and empire, and, two, that it involved a very large section, probably the majority, of Jews across the empire. Such things don't happen out of nothing.